Open Science thoughts and learnings

Open Science is a really important topic because science should be available and accessible by everyone. In addition, science is often funded by public organisms that in the current model have to pay multiple times for the science works: researchers, access to the publications of that researches and sometimes also to publish that works. This situation has no sense and should be urgently improved.

The Open Science movement recalls the ‘Public Money, Public Code’ initiative, that pretends that projects funded by public organisms must be open source to benefit the whole society. It’s not exactly the same because in this case the money is not paid multiple times but without this requirement the code cannot be reused and even in future projects the money could be wasted to updates or improvements over a project funded with public money.

But Open Science is not only about avoiding wasting money paying for the same thing multiple times: the science should be available for the whole society and this only can be achieved via Open Science. The most obvious thing is the freely available resources to citizens, who usually don’t pay to read a scientific paper and also they not should. Nevertheless, Open Science goes beyond: involving the whole society since the beginning of the scientific studies permits to improve the scientific results not only getting more data but also receiving more ideas and different points of view that improve the scientific results.

And Open Science is not only about involving citizens, but about collaboration. If the scientific studies are open since the beginning a lot of waste of efforts is saved when several teams work in the same thing. In addition, the scientific process is improved getting feedback of other researchers and finding together reusable ideas and data. And also in this way it is more easier to find errors in the early states of the studies, saving a lot of efforts in incorrect work and improving therefore the efficiency of studies, that not only saves money but also speed up the scientific work and therefore the scientific advances are achieved earlier.

Another essential topic is that Open Science is not an utopia but an achievable thing. Without being the same thing, free and open source (FOSS) movement has demonstrated that open collaboration can achieve amazing results. And it’s important to not forget that the FOSS movement was harder that Open Science, since scientific are not paid for selling their work but to produce scientific results meanwhile the only direct incomes of many open source projects are donations (some companies have proved that profit can be generated from open source projects, but an important percentage of FOSS projects are not driven nor funded by companies).

An important learning of this course is that Open Science is much more than freely available publications, results and data. The Open Science approach is a methodology applied from the beginning to the end of the research and benefits are gotten in all the stages.

Other great findings are the resources learned in this course, like the OpenAIRE, Sherpa Romeo, Sherpa Juliet, Open Research Button or predatoryjournals.com website. These resources permit to find open versions of publications and to categorise publishers and funders, which is obviously very useful to achieve Open Science. Other essential resources are data and code repositories, where Zenodo is the most remarkable one.

Another paramount topic is the Data Management Plan, not only because it is required in many public funded projects but because it allows to think about the data since the beginning of the research and so finding all the possible caveats as soon as possible. It also permits to do a follow-up of the data during the whole research, that is obviously essential.

Knowing the different types of Open Access publications is also needed to publish and get funds, and this course has explained the differences between Gold Open Access, Green Open Access and the other levels in a clear manner.

In spite of they can be shadowed by other more amazing things, the importance of open identifiers is also enormous. This course has taught the relevance of getting a ORCID identifier for the authors and assigning DOI to all publications in order they can be linked and be more easily searchable. Though the identifiers are the most important metadata, there are other useful information like keywords and institutions that should be also assigned to easy search and links.

Last but not least, the Open Science Cafés have produced very interesting and nurturing discussions about Open Science and also they have made possible to learn about Open Science topics directly taught by prestigious people in this field.

To sum up, Open Science is a fantastic approach to get more fair and collaborative science saving in duplicated costs and involving more people in the science process. To become an open scientist (something that I had already in mind in spite to not to know all the things learnt in this course) I will publish my research data in public repositories and publications as open access. In addition, I will recommend the research group of my PhD mentors to involve in the Full Open Science initiative.